Airlines Fly Away From Ebola, Leaving Aid Workers Stranded
By Justin Bachman
Bloomberg.com
October 15, 2014
The three West African nations hit hardest by the Ebola pandemic have seen a dramatic reduction in airline service, and it’s not simply because travelers don’t want to go. There’s one group of travelers—medical aid workers—who urgently want to reach the affected countries to help patients and disrupt transmission of the virus.
British Airways stopped flying to Sierra Leone and Liberia back in August, and the carrier recently extended that hiatus until March 31. Emirates likewise ended its flights during the same month between Dubai and Conakry, the capital of Guinea. Now the travel restrictions are going the other way, too: British officials over the weekend told an African-based carrier, Gambia Bird, it could not operate a nonstop flight from London to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Gambia Bird had planned to resume the London-Freetown route on Friday to bring back a flight used by both nongovernmental organizations and business travelers, an airline spokesman said. The carrier, owned by German airline Germania, had stopped its flights in August due to the Ebola crisis.
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